Megawatt-hour (MWh)

A measure of electric energy; the equivalent of
1,000 kilowatt-hours or 1 million watt-hours. Megawatt-hours are
determined by a plantís capacity and how long the plant is running. A
1,000 MW power plant running at full power for one hour produces 1,000
megawatt-hours (MWhs) of electricity. If the plant runs all day, it
produces 24,000 MWhs.

A 2.0 MW wind turbine operating at full power 25% of the time (a
questionably high estimate in the Finger Lakes) can be expected to produce 12
MWhs of electricity in one day or 4,380 MWhs annually.

By comparison, the Ginna plant, operating at its average 98.6% efficiency, produces
491 MWhs of
electricity per hour, which amounts to 11,800 MWhs per day or 4,310,000 MWhs
annually, about the equivalent of 1,000 large wind turbines. However,
Ginna's power is always online and is not dependent on how much or when
the wind blows.

Nuclear vs. Wind Power

In the graph below you can see that the Ginna plant
currently produces about 10% of New York's nuclear electrical power.
Cohocton's wind project would add/replace about 0.5% to that, at best. To
add the equivalent of one Ginna plant would require 1000 turbines as noted
above. Can you imagine the Finger Lakes region covered with 1000 or more
wind towers, each as high as the hills they're on? And that would barely
get us to nuclear's 1970 level.

What about the larger picture?

Current
Fuel Mix for Electricity Generation in U.S.

and
New York State

Coal

Nuclear

Gas

Hydro

Oil

Other

United
States

52%

20%

17%

5%

4%

2%

New
York

16%

28%

29%

16%

10%

<2%

Current total annual consumption of electric power in New
York runs about 143,000 Thousand MWhs. 1000 wind turbines blanketing the
hills of the Finger Lakes may produce as much as 4,380 of these or about
3% of this total. 50 wind turbines in Cohocton might produce up to 220 of
these, or less than 1/6th of 1% of New York's consumption. Pretty puny
power for all the expense, mess, and disruption. Perhaps instead of littering our environment, we need to be looking
more seriously at other ways of conservation and less intrusive production
alternatives.

For instance, click
here for an authoritative article about replacing greenhouse gas
production with nuclear power.

Accommodating for Overdevelopment

Wind farms, while an apparently appealing approach to some,
are a classic example of what environmentalists call an
"end-of-the-pipe solution". Instead of tackling the problem -
our massive demand for energy - at source, they provide less damaging
means of accommodating it. Or part of it. The Cohocton project, by
replacing energy generation from power stations burning fossil fuel,
promises to reduce carbon dioxide emission by about 200,000 tons a year.
This is impressive, until you discover that a single jumbo jet, flying
from London to Miami and back every day, releases the climate-change
equivalent of 575,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. One daily connection
between Britain and Florida costs nearly three large wind farms.

Alternative wind technology permits us to imagine that we can build our
way out of trouble. By responding to one form of overdevelopment with
another, we can, we believe, continue to expand our total energy demands
without destroying the planetary systems required to sustain human life.
This might, for a while, be true. But it would soon require the use of the
entire scenic landscape of the US.